Savegame Size Unacceptable

[Fransens]

I don't know about you folks, but a 500 megabyte large savegame file for a single save-slot on turn 415 is not my kind of idea on how big saves should be.
Even if ALL of your savegame files would amount to half a gig it would still be way too much.

...and now think about how many savegames you have. Chances are you have saved every couple of turns. Maybe every twentieth.
Probably started a few playthroughs to see how each race plays, right?

I just scrubbed my Master of Orion Save folder (it's under your documents) of 7 gigs.
Seriously, they need to optimize that. No other game has this BS.

Sidenote: If you have bad performance during later games, now you know where you can clean house. Might be a quirk of my own PC but the perfomance of post-turn-400 has increased a bit after doing two things: cleaning out most saves, and NOT having a warp-gate in every system I control. The galaxy map looked like a messy's spiderweb. XD

[kharnvor]

Never checked my save file size. That's gigantic if so. Still, don't forget this is early access and it's possible they haven't optimized and compressed the save files yet. That would definitely be one of the last things on my list to polish.

[Superpescado]

probably have a lot of debug stuff in there would be my guess.

[76561198202081837]

The save files are a bit on the chunky side due to the lack of Autosaving (if you haven't noticed). Our autosaves are giving you the ability to go into the Timeline graph and being able to go back in time erasing everything you've done up to the point of your choosing.

[univ3rsalsoulja]

The save files are a bit on the chunky side due to the lack of Autosaving (if you haven't noticed). Our autosaves are giving you the ability to go into the Timeline graph and being able to go back in time erasing everything you've done up to the point of your choosing.

Originally posted by elpozoleolmeca:

The save files are a bit on the chunky side due to the lack of Autosaving (if you haven't noticed). Our autosaves are giving you the ability to go into the Timeline graph and being able to go back in time erasing everything you've done up to the point of your choosing.

But are you all working to remedy that?

[univ3rsalsoulja]

Originally posted by univ3rsalsoulja:

The save files are a bit on the chunky side due to the lack of Autosaving (if you haven't noticed). Our autosaves are giving you the ability to go into the Timeline graph and being able to go back in time erasing everything you've done up to the point of your choosing


But are you all working to remedy that? The size thing.

[Ninjafroggie]

wow....i had no idea the save files were so stupidly large. I just cleaned out all my old saves and freed up 22gb on my hard drive.

[AugustusKron]

wow, it's been a long time since i've seen anyone complain about the size of save files... like, late '90s maybe

[FourteenFour]

Originally posted by elpozoleolmeca:

The save files are a bit on the chunky side due to the lack of Autosaving (if you haven't noticed). Our autosaves are giving you the ability to go into the Timeline graph and being able to go back in time erasing everything you've done up to the point of your choosing.

This needs to be a per game option or over all client option. While it is a neat trick and possibly one of the better features; I have not really tested it; let us have a toggle so we can keep smaller save files.

Turn on Timeline Replay [ ] *Warning increases save file size immensely

[Fransens]

Originally posted by AugustusKron:

wow, it's been a long time since i've seen anyone complain about the size of save files... like, late '90s maybe

I do care when it starts eating gigabytes of my OS' partition.
I do care when a games' savegame folder is two times larger than THE DAMN GAME ITSELF.
I also care when the savegame folder is bigger than my whole Eve Online install folder.
Or the Wildstar folder.

Hell, even Fallout 4 is 29.1 gigs... Ninjafroggie is pretty close on that with his 22gigs.

We complain about Full-Game-Installation size alot at times. It's a marked difference if I want to install 4 games with 30+ gigs of HD requirement or 4 games with 1-9 gigs.
On one hand I have to start juggling what to keep and what to uninstall. On the other hand I just install them all.

And suddenly we are okay with a game, silently mind you, eating a crapton of our OS' harddrive? Because PCs are in such dire need of more reasons to be moody little machines?

...anyway, I see only an issue if this is still active at launch of the game.
Just figured I make a little fuzz so at least a few people notice it and save themselves the trouble of wondering where all their precious HDD-space went.
Just... don't forget packaging that savefiles down on launch. Or the option FourteenFour suggested. No need to make the race to the top THAT easy for Stellaris, amirite?

[Dark Fire]

Originally posted by Fransens:

Originally posted by AugustusKron:

wow, it's been a long time since i've seen anyone complain about the size of save files... like, late '90s maybe

I do care when it starts eating gigabytes of my OS' partition.
I do care when a games' savegame folder is two times larger than THE DAMN GAME ITSELF.
I also care when the savegame folder is bigger than my whole Eve Online install folder.
Or the Wildstar folder.

Hell, even Fallout 4 is 29.1 gigs... Ninjafroggie is pretty close on that with his 22gigs.

We complain about Full-Game-Installation size alot at times. It's a marked difference if I want to install 4 games with 30+ gigs of HD requirement or 4 games with 1-9 gigs.
On one hand I have to start juggling what to keep and what to uninstall. On the other hand I just install them all.

And suddenly we are okay with a game, silently mind you, eating a crapton of our OS' harddrive? Because PCs are in such dire need of more reasons to be moody little machines?

...anyway, I see only an issue if this is still active at launch of the game.
Just figured I make a little fuzz so at least a few people notice it and save themselves the trouble of wondering where all their precious HDD-space went.
Just... don't forget packaging that savefiles down on launch. Or the option FourteenFour suggested. No need to make the race to the top THAT easy for Stellaris, amirite?

Personally, I don't mind the current auto-save feature. I think the solution really should be that with the roll-back feature, we don't need multiple saves. So, instead how about when we save the game the file is always something like "Mrrshan-Small-VeryHard-23084-0" for Race:Galaxy Size:Difficulty:Seed:Multiple instance of the same filename (meaning the user has created a brand new game with the same settings). In this case, when save the game and load it later, it's always the same file (it should ask then if you want to overwrite it all the time) and the player only has as many saves as unique playthroughs they've created.

[Boswelli]

Originally posted by AugustusKron:

wow, it's been a long time since i've seen anyone complain about the size of save files... like, late '90s maybe

Well, this game is consuming a lot of space on the OS drive, and i think it is common to have a relative small partition and/or SSD for that case, so it IS an issue if one game think it could fill the whole system drive with it's data without asking or giving the chance to save the files on another drive e.g.

I am running Win 10 on a 64GB SSD, and i (normally) do not use the "my documents"-area for my personal files. My programs are installed on a separate HDD, rest of the data is located on a NAS. After playing a few games MoO, my system drive is full, and i have to delete the saves, which is quite annoying! It isn't really a nice behaviour of the devs to occupy my OS drive without asking!

[Dark Fire]

Originally posted by Boswelli:

It sin't a really nice behaviour of the devs to occupy my OS drive without asking for!

Welcome to a program in the development cycle ;) This kind of thing is actually normal for testing purposes. Save files aren't usually condensed until the final release version.

[HarmlessYoda]

Guys, why is your documents folder on your OS partition instead of on a mirrored raid or storage partition? You can simply right click on documents, choose the locations tab and then choose a new location for it where it is not using up your SSD.

My recommendation is to have an SSD for your OS and games that have loading screens, use a raid 1 or mirrored setup of traditional HHD's for bulk storage + redundancy. And then use something like onedrive or googledrive or any other form of cloud storage for those really critical items you cant afford to loose again assigning the cloud storage replicate directory to your mirrored storage not your SSD.

This is a cheap and easy setup, you could of course have one SSD for your OS one for games and several more SSD's for storage but I personally dont have that kind of cash and can settle with using 2x3tb mirrored drives as the source of storage for the majority of my needs and a single 500gb SSD for OS and games.

[Boswelli]

Originally posted by HarmlessYoda:

Guys, why is your documents folder on your OS partition instead of on a mirrored raid or storage partition? You can simply right click on documents, choose the locations tab and then choose a new location for it where it is not using up your SSD.

My documents laying on a raid 1 NAS but that's not the point here ;-) I do not use the built-in Windows-document folder, so i had no reason to relocate it. You know, never change a running system.
The real point is that as a game developer you can't expect your customers being computer experts! I guess about 90% of all players just USE their pcs, and do not know how to change specific system setting nor want it. And many gaming pcs you can buy in stores actually have this setting - windows on a (small) SSD + a separate HDD for storage. And all of these computers have the documents-folder still on the OS drive by default. So the devs should be aware that most of the players will have a very limited space for savegames!

It's simple maths, computer experts COULD be gamers but not every gamer is a computer expert ;-)

[GM Pax]

Originally posted by Fransens:

[...] 500 megabyte large savegame file [...]

My multi-terabyte hard drive laughs at your woes. >:)

Seriously. Just the D: partition - my Games drive - has 1.31TB of free space. That's 1,310,000 megabytes, enough for over twenty-five hundred (re)MoO saves.

This is me, very very very not worried. :)

Plus I'm sure the saves will be en-smallened come Release.

Originally posted by Boswelli:

The real point is that as a game developer you can't expect your customers being computer experts!

You don't have to be an expert. Both Win7 and Win10 make relocating libraries, including My Documents, extremely simple.

And all of these computers have the documents-folder still on the OS drive by default.

Then the supposed computer experts who built the computer and installed/setup the OS in the first place, are idiots.